One of the many enhancements in the DS80C320 is its high-speed architecture. This architecture
provides an immediate speed increase with no change to existing software. The speed increase was
obtained by redesigning the processor core. The original 8052 used 12 oscillator cycles for each
instruction cycle whereas the DS80C320 does the same work in only 4 oscillator cycles.

Generally, the DS80C320 may be dropped into an existing 8052 design to immediate increase speed
without any need to modify the software. The exception are programs which have critical timing
issues which count on given instructions taking a certain amount of time to execute. Such programs
will need to be modified to take into account the DS80C320s faster execution speed.